Monthly Archive

There is nothing like a large screen porch with a tin roof on a stormy night. Unless it is a list of unfortunate events happening elsewhere. Here are my favorite links to unfortunate happenings (some of which are useful for preventative purposes):

Son Arend is home for the summer, which turned out to be like a Netflix ad this evening. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg was waiting for us when we arrived home. “Sorry, mom” he said when he realized I had realized it was a musical. “Ah,” I said, three minutes in,”not a musical – an opera.” And approximately half the words sung to the same haunting, and hauntingly familiar, as they say, theme.

This led to a search for the tune, which I was sure must have been on every Muzak ever recorded. Robert identified it as “I Will Wait for You,” which inevitably led to YouTube, with this Connie Francis/anime video. (Danger, major saccharine.)

Andy Williams, Liza Minelli and who knows who else also recorded it, so I’m sure I was right about the Muzak.

This of course led to the reminder that Michael Legrand had also written “Windmills of Your Mind” which I have remembered for years as being in a movie. For years I thought it was “The President’s Analyst” So I was pleased to discover it was “The Thomas Crowne Affair” which came out in 1968, one of my few periods of actually seeing movies, so I must have gone, possibly on a college date. The montage is apparently Steve McQueen swooping about in a glider. Here’s the Dusty Springfield version:

This led me to comment on the rather odd line “And the world is like an apple whirling silently in space.” Robert pointed out that it might have been the translation from French, which led me on a further chase for the French lyrics, oddly elusive until I figured out that the French title is not Le Moulins de mon Esprit, but Les Moulins de mon Coeur. Of course, the French version has nothing about apples – it is sunflowers blooming (which may be just as odd an image.)